Together, Against Terror

(The article was originally published in Indian Express on April 26, 2025 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)

How do we handle Pakistan, which is hell-bent on subjecting India to deadly acts of war and terror even if they hurt its own interests? There are no easy answers. The Indian state has tried several options. We sought to befriend Pakistan, repeatedly. We fought three big wars – in 1965, 1971, and 1999. We defeated it in all three, and in the 1971 war, Pakistan was dismembered. When it resorted to proxy war by using terrorists to carry out attacks in Indian cities, including on Parliament in December 2001, we prepared our forces for another war, unleashed an international campaign to expose the ugly terror underbelly of that country and even executed limited cross-LoC and cross-border attacks in recent years.

After coming to power in 2014, the Narendra Modi government, with the help of the J&K state administration, determinedly went after terrorists. In some instances, like the neutralising of Burhan Wani, Pakistan-sponsored terror outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) tried to generate mass hysteria and unrest for some time. But the government didn’t blink. Instead, it went ahead with measures like the abrogation of Article 370 and bringing the state under central rule in 2019. Despite this severe crackdown on the terror infrastructure in Kashmir — including banning multiple outfits and dismantling overground financial and civil support systems in the past 10 years — Pakistan-sponsored terrorists manage to reappear occasionally.

The heavy presence of security forces on the one hand and good governance measures on the other resulted in diminishing local recruitments for terror outfits. There was a time, not long ago, when hundreds of youth would join the terrorists’ ranks each year. Reports suggest that only four locals joined in 2024 — this lack of local support forced handlers across the border to change tactics. New outfits like The Resistance Front (TRF), a proxy of LeT, and People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF), a proxy of JeM, were created with deceptively secular-sounding names, helping Pakistan escape the scrutiny of the Financial Action Task Force.

The Pulwama suicide attack in February 2019, which led to the deaths of more than 40 CRPF personnel, was the last deadly act of the JeM and its proxies. After that, the new outfits swung into action and started indulging in lone-wolf-style attacks on security forces and civilians. These attacks remained sporadic during the Covid years. But in 2023-2024, these groups carried out several attacks mainly in the Jammu region. Pahalgam was the major attack this year, claimed by TRF.

The barbarity of the Pahalgam attack has shaken everybody. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims. There are calls for severe retribution from the government. B Raman, one of our great spymasters, used to say that the terrorists have to be lucky just once while the agencies have to be successful all the time. Pahalgam was one such day for the terrorists. It should wake us up to the lapses and loopholes in our system. While it is a fact that many locals came to the rescue of the tourists in Pahalgam, it is also a fact that no such major incident is possible without some local involvement. The human and tech intelligence capabilities of our security agencies require further augmentation. With a hardcore Islamist like Asim Munir at the helm of affairs in the Pakistan army, our security establishment needs more vigilance and alertness.

Kashmir has seen highs and lows of terror. The last few years have been low on terror due to the proactive measures taken by our security establishment. More than 400 terrorists have been neutralised in the previous decade, 72 in 2023 alone. Terrorist incidents, too, have sharply declined from 228 in 2018 to less than 20 in 2024. Civilian casualties declined from 55 in 2018 to 13 in 2023. With no local recruitment happening, current estimates suggest almost 60 of the estimated 76 active terrorists are Pakistanis.

The fight against terror will not succeed without the support of the people. Kashmiris have to now resolve to fully stand by the government in eliminating the remaining traces of the scourge from the Valley. More than 30 per cent of Kashmir’s workforce depends on tourism, which generates around 10 per cent of the Union Territory’s GDP. Through the Pahalgam incident, terrorists conclusively proved that they have no concern for the bread and butter of Kashmiris. It seems to have shaken the conscience of most Kashmiris, who came out in large numbers to protest against the incident. It is heartening to see many known soft separatist voices, too, taking part in candlelight marches. Indeed, this incident will severely impact tourism in the state. But the protests shouldn’t be limited to reassuring tourists to come back. There should be a sincere effort to isolate and reject all those remaining elements in Kashmiri society that continue to occasionally indulge in reckless rhetoric that helps create a conducive atmosphere for the terrorists. For example, one senior leader of the UT’s ruling party said earlier this year that the growing numbers of tourists constituted a “cultural invasion” of Kashmir. Not coincidentally, TRF, too, justified its Pahalgam attack on the same spurious argument that the tourists were a demographic threat to Kashmir.

For the rest of the country, the way forward should be not to subject the Kashmiris to daily patriotism tests on primetime TV shows or harass them in cities and towns across the country. Instead, it should be about understanding how the government was able to win over more and more Kashmiris away from separatism and how to complete the process.

With the entire leadership  of the world standing behind him, PM Modi thundered that the terrorists and “their backers” would be pursued “to the end of the earth” and punished. Modi is not just a “man of words”, but a “man of deeds”. Therein lies the answer to the question I raised at the beginning of the article.